[New Thread] More context on our changes to pricing - FAQs answered

[ed727]

@josinaldo

The use of no-code tools has been subject to criticism from traditional developers, who have raised concerns about issues such as vendor lock-in and a lack of control over the final product.

Yup. And because of this, when it comes to no-code, the most important thing is absolute trust in the stability and predictability of a platform and its pricing.

Anyone arguing against no-code will be able to point to Bubble as the test case for why no-code can’t be trusted.

Just last week I was at a meetup for Bubble builders and there was so much positive energy in the room (me included) as people shared their aspirations and successes. That has been evaporated in an instant. The vast majority of those people will need to move on from Bubble because of uncertain and prohibitive costs.

I’ve been in the finance and business world for a long time, and I can’t think of any situation where a company drops a 10x+ price increase before holiday weekend and then just goes dark. It’s truly baffling.

[buero]

The video is me reading the forum haha

what a beautiful morning post. Same procedure as every year? lol

They should just made a big poll for all user to upvote and the winner pricing takes over. It is not that complex.

seems they did listen to the interviews they had with their users (including me) and decided to price everything at once hahaha and not come up with something new.

hope you got that ship back on track, (titanic already hit the ice… be fast guys. we all want to stay - most of us are just afraid.)

PS: i think you did a way better job with the data storage pricing - found good sweet spot where it is expensive but still interesting to stay in the plattform

jo with the rest - yeah i think we do not need a comment on this

[di_lucena]

@tatiana.a

92% of apps would see less than a $250/month change, and 83% would see less than a $50/month change.

Ok than!
Create a $50 plan that hosts 83% of bubble apps and a $250 plan that hosts the rest of them, since tou claim that 92% would fit in.

All this discussion is about the 8% left???

[sohaan_gd]

lol such a no brainer! Makes so much sense lol

[boston85719]

They did not need to come up with new pricing to remain profitable.

I’ve been part of conversations with Bubble insiders…the need was to turn signups into subscribers. The issue was that the percentage of signups that converted to paid subscribers was paltry and that if they just doubled the percentage that converted, they’d double revenues.

Bubbles goals as stated over the past 12 months to help make those conversions was focused on education and making the platform easier to use, to flatten the learning curve.

That being said, there is a chance that they decided to iterate on how to increase revenues and decided that if they take a current app priced at $30/month and reconfigure pricing so the same app now has to pay $300/month and in doing so caused 90% of their paid user base to jump ship, they would have the same revenues with less overhead, so more profit. WHICH, goes completely against what the founders claim as Bubbles mission to democratize app/software development.

[kossiorek1]

But Bubble could do it in a simple way to terminate free apps for for example 1 month and if don’t pay minimum fee that could close these apps. In that case they could save a lot of money spend on infrastructure.

[gazinhio]

Yup I’m looking very closely at Noodl, it looks seriously good.

[hoke]

just downloaded it. Let’s see if it’s good

[aj11]

Something I want to share.

Our company received an acquisition offer of $10m recently. We have a great product (built with Bubble) that is in high demand and it was a large CRM looking to buy us up as feature to add to their platform.

We started talking about tech stack, and the acquirer backed out a week later. They said they weren’t interested in buying a product that was locked into a provider like Bubble, too much platform risk.

Heartbreaking.

We always knew that a sale for our tech would be difficult if we were built on Bubble, but we consoled ourselves that the speed and cost effectiveness of Bubble development made up for this lack of IP value.

“We will out build them,” we thought, “We will prove them wrong about Bubble!”

Boy, do we feel really dumb right now.

It’s clear that Bubble is looking at the apparent disparity of how expensive/hard they think it is to develop in code, and they want to be able to charge something that reflects some of that value they think Bubble is providing in that regard. The want us to “share our pies” so to speak, eh @keith?

Here’s the problem: The value of an app developed on Bubble is NOT the equivalent of an app developed with traditional code. NOT EVEN CLOSE. Even if the functionality is identical.

For me and my company, the difference in value ended up being $10 MILLION DOLLARS.

Your platform lock-in negates a massive portion of the value you think you’re providing. That’s ok, as long as your pricing reflects that, but this new pricing does not reflect that.

Why the hell would I develop a product on Bubble when…

A. It is worth a fraction at exit of what it would otherwise be worth if built in code?

B. It costs 1000x what it costs to run/host a product built in code (not including development cost)?

C. It has a substantially less predictable cost structure than regular code?

“Oh but AJ, you’re saving $100,000s on the actual development of the code.”

Have you heard of CHATGPT?

Have your heard of FLUTTERFLOW?

Have you heard or DRAFTBIT?

Have you heard of NOODL?

These are just a few of many no-code tools for generating actual standalone codebases. Might not have been viable a few years ago, but THE MARKET HAS CHANGED. This new proposed pricing shows a shockingly level of “head in the sand” to that fact.

Speaking of “head in the sand” mine has been in the sand about the absolutely ludicrous idea that it was ok to trust Bubble with complete control of my application when I’m building a serious business. That the trade off of full control for (what is now a slight) easier time of building, was an acceptable one.

This fiasco has completely shaken me of this idea. I stood by Bubble through the last pricing disaster, thinking they learned their lesson, but it is clear that they have not.

No matter what kind of changes or backpedaling we see next week, I cannot wait to transition off this platform.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m stuck here for right now. And tbh I may end up having to use Bubble as frontend for a while until we are able to completely rebuild it with react native or flutter (via the above options), but there is no doubt in my mind that we will be leaving, hopefully before the end of the 18 month window.

We made a $10m mistake building here in the first place. I won’t allow that number to continue to grow with ridiculous pricing layered on top. I’m simply not interested in paying a premium to be at a massive disadvantage relative to any other development path.

[gpxstream]

Out of curiosity, what does the WU usage look like on that considering everything all the calcs are (assuming) done on the front end?

[magnus.kanholt]

I have been in the same investor & fundraising discussion.

[bdthomas]

@aj11 that’s insane, I’m sorry to hear that!

[chris.williamson1996]

$14k/3months for dedicated may be cheaper to go dedicated for any slightly complex app​:rofl:

[ramzizi]

If you have a $10M offer and the only reason they backed out was the backend, maybe you can hire a developer to quickly mimic your site using full code?

[aj11]

It’s an extremely complex product. It can be done, and we will do it, but not in the timeframe the acquirer was willing to wait on. They had other options that were less robust but in standard codebases.

[fok_ste]

Did you do some research if there is some kind of a migration tool?
I mean, its possible to export an XML file out of bubble with all page settings. Maybe there is a way to “translate” the xml content into code or to do a migration to an other platform

[ramzizi]

Sorry man. I will keep that in mind. Bubble in my mind is now only useful for creating an MVP. The second I get any traction is when I will be looking at having it properly developed

[chris.williamson1996]

No the export is bubbles json that is only useable in the bubble editor

[fok_ste]

i know - but I mean its 2023 and I can’t understand why there is no tool that can ‘transform’ this based on some logics/libaries/… into some usabele code.

You know what i mean?

[tja]

I dont think the Bubble team understand that we have developed apps for clients where we have signed an agreement for monthly costs. Bubble is taking us out of business by exceeding costs above our margins settled with our customers. It is difficult to optimize an app when the Bubble platform is not optimized.

Each ‘do a search for’ pull all the table columns from the db and in addition to that, Bubble send all that data to the client.

You can control this with privacy rules but it is really difficult to do as changes to conditions in the privacy rules require a page reload to take place.

There is also no option for creating complex data types on the client which makes it hard to do stuff on the client side without going to the db. Only simple data types are supported (text, number etc).

Please let existing apps follow the old price model and new apps can follow the new model. That is not optimal but it is a better option.